Page:Zhuang Zi - translation Giles 1889.djvu/50

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16
Chuang Tzŭ

"If we are to be guided by the criteria of our own minds, who shall be without a guide?

The mind should be a tabula rasa, free from all judgments or opinions of its own as to the external world, and ready only to accept things as they are, not as they appear to be.

What need to know of the alternations of passion,

As above described.

when the mind thus affords scope to itself?—verily even the minds of fools! Whereas, for a mind without criteria

As it should be.

to admit the idea of contraries, is like saying, I went to Yüeh to-day, and got there yesterday.

One of Hui Tzŭ's paradoxes. See ch. xxxiii.

Or, like placing nowhere somewhere,—topography which even the Great Yü

The famous engineer of antiquity (B.C. 2205), who drained the empire of a vast body of water and arranged its subdivision into nine provinces.

would fail to understand; how much more I?

"Speech is not mere breath. It is differentiated by meaning. Take away that, and you cannot say whether it is speech or not. Can you even distinguish it from the chirping of young birds?

"But how can Tao be so obscured that we speak of it as true and false? And how can speech be